Large-scale production of DNA sequencing templates by microtitre format PCR

Large scale DNA sequencing projects require gel readers with high throughput and good base-calling accuracy with as little manual intervention as possible. The automatic sequencing machines now available meet these requirements quite well, indeed, a single ABI 373A machine can read at least around 500 samples/200 000 nt per week. Thus, a full-time sequencing laboratory will need to produce thousands of sequencing templates per week, in order to make full use of several ABI machines. Efforts to address the problems of template production have focussed on automating the processing of miniprep cultures (1-5). PCR methods (6-9) obviating the processing of miniprep cultures would offer a great time saving but as yet, reliable large